Given Away

"Jennifer Barber's perceptions are so specific and surprising in these beautiful and rigorous poems, her diction and music so pure, her rhetoric so without excess or self-congratulations that her discipline as an artist seems supernatural. Stunning verbal artifacts, human in scale, are made vast, spiritualized by their implications."

—Vijay Seshadri, author of The Long Meadow

"Whether striking a ‘blue-yellow hood’ of flame from a wooden match, or scattering Ezekiel's coals over the city to ‘sow the light of reckoning,’ Jennifer Barber's poems are small, deft, psalms, large in spiritual scope. She celebrates elementals: water and salt, darkness and light, silence and utterance, in an art of delicacy, quiet, and precision."